Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Four
The Invisible Game: How Football Teaches Us About Being Human

Here’s the thing about teams: They aren’t really about winning—not in the sense that most people think. Sure, there’s a scoreboard, and at the end of 90 minutes, someone’s going to stand tall, basking in victory, and someone’s going to drag their boots off the pitch, muttering something half-formed about “next week.” But if you look closer, deeper—if you peel away the kits, the tactics, and the crowd noises—you see something else entirely. Something absurdly simple. What you see is people. People, in all their fractured, flawed, ridiculous humanity, trying to show up for each other.

Football, at its core, is a game. You chase a ball, you try to score. If you’re lucky, it hits the back of the net and people cheer. But if you let it, the game shifts. It mutates into something more than just a physical contest. It becomes a mirror, one that reflects not just who we are, but who we could be. It shows us, in all our absurdity and self-delusion, what it means to show up for someone else. And in that showing up, something strange happens.

Take the roles. I’m not talking about the traditional ones—the striker, the midfielder, the goalkeeper. I’m talking about the invisible roles, the ones that don’t show up on the scorecard, but make the game what it is. Ive written about these roles before...poorly...There’s the Joker—who cracks wise after every bad pass, masking the anxiety of failure with humor, because humor is armor. The Quiet One—who doesn’t say much, but is always there. A steady, unspoken presence. Just showing up, no questions asked, like a lighthouse standing still in the fog. Then there’s the Workhorse—the one who covers every blade of grass, who never makes the headlines but whose effort keeps the team alive. They don’t stand out, but they make everything possible.

Recap thought...But the beauty of these roles is that they’re never static. They aren’t defined once and for all. No, these roles flow in and out like water in an overfilled cup. Today, you’re the Wild One, running around like a man possessed; tomorrow, you’re the Philosopher, quietly reflecting with a teammate, taking in more than just the score. Sometimes, the joker stops laughing, the loud one goes quiet, and suddenly, the Young One teaches you about humility, or the Caretaker reveals just how much you need a little care yourself.

Here’s where things get really interesting—beautiful, even. You see, when you really start paying attention, you notice how these roles aren’t just things we slip into. They’re reflections of something more. They’re the echoes of who we are, who we need to be in that moment. And it’s in the fluidity of these roles—this constant shifting—that you see the true beauty of a team emerge.

At its core, football is a reflection of life. We are all, at some point or another, each of these players. We are the Joker, using humor to shield us from the weight of the world. We are the Quiet One, unsure of how to speak, but steadfast in our presence. We are the Workhorse, showing up every day, even when it’s hard, knowing that what we do matters—maybe not now, but someday. We are the Wild One, full of fire and life, afraid of being too contained. We are the Philosopher, the one who quietly holds space for the messy, confusing, contradictory truth of it all.

But what binds all these roles together—the shifting, the impermanence, the absurdity—is that for all of them, we need each other. It’s the collective presence that counts. And that’s what football teaches us: it’s not just about the individual roles we play, but how those roles, in their fluidity and complexity, bind us together.

I thought about this, in particular, on Thursday night. It’s after the match, when the lights were low, the crowd had gone, and we’re still in the stadium. The other team’s leaving...limping, but we’re still there. My team—our club—hasn’t left yet. We’re gathered in the shadow of the pitch, together, celebrating something no one could quite name. It’s not out loud, not in the way you’d expect something to be celebrated. It’s quieter. It’s in the way we gather around our friends...the goal-scorer, embracing him, capturing that fleeting moment of joy. It’s about holding the feeling, not rushing off to the next task, not retreating into the mundane. It’s about staying. We stayed in that moment because we knew it wasn’t going to come back.

I look around, and it hits me: this is what it’s all about. It’s the subtle understanding that, despite a loss, we are still here. We are still together. Maybe we’re celebrating survival, maybe it’s the pride of having made it through another season, or maybe it’s just that we’re going to miss this feeling when it’s gone. We don’t have the words for it—fuck it, words are unnecessary—but we know, in the core of our bones, that we’re doing something rare. We’re doing something that feels like being.

The roles we play in life, like in football, are just that—roles. And in the end, maybe they don’t matter as much as the fact that we played. We played for each other. We showed up for each other. And somewhere between the game and the afterthought, between the roles we adopt and the ones we abandon, we found something that might just be a little more real than any win or loss.

It’s here, in these moments, that I remember why I keep showing up. It’s not for the perfect pass, or the spectacular goal, or even the satisfaction of victory. It’s because in this beautiful, chaotic mess of life, there’s something to be said about staying with it, even when the lights go out, even when the crowd leaves. It’s about the connection that lingers, the moments that are more than just fleeting triumphs or defeats.

So, the next time I’m on the pitch, and I catch the eyes of a teammate—the Workhorse, the Philosopher, the Wild One, the Joker, the Quiet One—I’ll remember this. The real game isn’t played on the pitch. It’s played in the spaces between the roles, between the games. It’s played in the moments when we stop performing and start being. It’s played in the messy, beautiful, chaotic human connection we create just by showing up.

And that’s the invisible game. The one where, no matter what happens on the pitch, you realise the most important thing wasn’t the score—it was the people you played with. The people who showed up. And for a little while, we weren’t just playing the game. We were living it.